In the case of Alan Wake, the newest release by Remedy Studios, a more fitting tagline could not have been found. Remedy, makers of the fucking phenominal Max Payne games, have shown once again that they are one of the best in the business at their craft. They have taken some old tropes, applied them to a game’s structure, and mixed them together in such a seamless way, that it results in a wholly new idea. Alan Wake is an excellent mix of subtle horror, tense action, and engaging plot. It is, in every sense, a psychological action thriller. Not to mention it has an excellent soundtrack.

The game starts with the titular Alan Wake, a successful writer, narrating himself through a nightmare. He is being hunted by a murderer of his own creation, and is led through the rapidly destabalizing landscape by a being of intense light. As he snaps out of his sleep, he is comforted by his wife Alice. They’re about to arrive in Bright Falls, a small isolated town in the pacific northwest. Alan hasn’t written anything in two years, and they’ve decided that a break away from New York might cure his block. As they embark into the town, meet the people, and get directions to their cabin, some weird shit starts going down. The isolated cabin is nothing less than hair shrivelingly creepy, complete with crows, animal trophies, and rickety shacks. Moments after the sun goes down, the real nighmare begins.

The game cuts to Alan, bloody and confused, hanging from his car at the bottom of a cliff. From here we must navigate him past the darkness to safety and, more importantly, answers. The plot is, weirdly enough, episodic. Each new episode starts with “previously on Alan Wake”, which I thought was kind of cool, personally. Like the story was a little miniseries. At the beginning of each episode, Alan’s circumstances turn to shit, and he is thrust into the night, armed only with a flashlight. The game’s main mechanic is to combat with light. You have a flashlight that you can use to weaken enemies, wich can then be finished off with your revolver. You can also pick up flares, a flare gun, and even Flashbang grenades. Some situations require you to be creative with ambient light sources, and overall the idea stays fresh.

Alan Wake‘s plot is intriguing and incredibly well written. When a story has multiple perspectives and layers, and I can’t tell which one is real, I would say it succeeds. The setting is tense and spooky, blended with a subtle layer of dread. At certain points, I found myself actually not wanting to explore for pickups, because fuck dude, I’m not going down that path. That way is dark and scary, and there’s no way. This game actually managed to override my gaming OCD habits. Kudos.

So I loved this game. It’s a solid story wrapped in some solid gameplay. That said, I finished it in a couple days, so I still recommend renting it rather than buying. A surprise title out of the always dark Remedy studios, it’s definately worth checking out.

Oh shit, I did it again. What was my point? Right, the time issues regarding the hobby of vidya games in that there does not exist enough of it. I literally do not have enough time in the day to play to completion all the games coming out, nevermind older gen games I never tried when they were new. And I mean, like… even if that was all I did, AND I only stuck to the games that I knew about. If I quit my job, and did nothing but eat sleep and game, I’d be a total loser. Wait, no, I’d be broke. No, shit, I mean I still wouldn’t have enough time to finish all the games coming out. Not that I’m going to stop, let’s not be crazy pants here, but it occurs to me that gaming has become polarized as of late. You’re either completely casual, or you’re fucking hardcore, and if you’re hardcore it’s with ONE game. There’s no middle ground anymore. This isn’t a hobby a kid could just pick up like we used to way back when, they’d never be able to afford it. Even adults can’t afford it, if they want to enjoy the whole spectrum of gaming. In this coming decade, it appears as though the only people capable of being actually into gaming, without drowning in the pastime, are those that are in and/or next to the business. The people whose job allows them access to current equipment and titles for minimal or no cost, be they reviewers, designers, or just people who know people, y’know? Which isn’t their fault, either, it’s just where they ended up. I doubt they laugh maniacally over it. Point is, gaming is an industry now, and it’s moving WAY faster than anyone could have expected. A lot of people are gonna miss out because they don’t have the money, or more likely the time, to keep up with it. I just hope there’s still room for people like that in the future.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Don’t even ask. I’m not doing that joke. I know there’s thirteen of them; it’s a very popular series. You can just take your “clever” word pun and fuck off. Yeah? Yeah? You know what? There’s another one coming out, as their next online game, and then XV after that. Eat it, person reading this. You know why they’re all named Final Fantasy? ‘Cause it’s a franchise, you asshat. Square Enix makes a lot of money from these games, and they’re not about to go ruin their flagship title just because you’re some smarmy douche with a terrible sense of humour. Who are you anyway, to think you can get a multi-million dollar company to just change the names of their games like that? Who told you you could do that? Was it that Miyamoto asshole? Don’t listen to him, he’s just bitter cause they left him for Sony. Poor bastard….

It’s a decent game, and its drawbacks are mostly just “lost in translation” stuff.  If you’re a fan of the series, you’ll probably have already played Final Fantasy XIII. For those who aren’t FF veterans, or who don’t play J-RPG’s in general, I imagine it won’t be very engaging. Give it a try if you’re looking for something new, it’s definitely an experience.  

There’s nothing much to say about the gameplay here. It’s a Pokémon game, and doesn’t deviate from the formula that has made it successful. You catch your favorite monsters, and make them fight other people’s monsters. It’s… that’s it. It’s Pokémon. I ignored my impulse to write hundreds of cockfight jokes and picked up the Soul Silver version to try. I had the original Silver version as a kid, because I like silver more than gold, and it totally had the spider pokémon in it. The new game is a pretty faithful remake of the original, aside from some dialog editing to fit into the extremely kid friendly tone the series has taken. A new character is added, a rival of opposite gender to whoever you chose, who occasionally pops up to give advice or battle you. Other than that, it’s a really good graphical upgrade of the original.

All in all, Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver are incredibly good remakes. They’re faithful to the originals but add some of the really cool ideas from the new games. If you played the games as a kid, or really enjoy the new ones, check it out.

The game takes place on the east coast of the United States. It’s been raining for weeks, and the city is somber. A body is found by some train tracks, covered in mud. The Origami Killer has returned. Every fall for the past three years, young boys have been disappearing. Their bodies found a few days later in the slums, drowned. All left with an orchid and origami figure on their chest. The police and FBI are left stagnant. The story revolves around four individuals, and their relation to the murders. The player controls one of the four characters at different times, and advances the plot from four separate viewpoints. Ethan Mars is an architect and father, who has experienced incredible loss, and is arguably the central figure in the story. Madison Paige, who interacts most with Ethan, is a journalist with insomnia who finds some purpose in investigating the disappearances.  We have Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler with a crippling addiction, sent to investigate the latest murder and aid the ongoing investigation. Finally, there is Scott Shelby, a private detective investigating the Origami Killer on his own time. The whole thing is a fairly well done murder mystery. Unfortunately there are a couple pretty glaring plot holes that sadly, I feel could have been avoided. It’s mostly the writers trying to implement too many red herrings, with the intention of maintaining suspense. I realize a story where the player is guessing is good, but it should at least make sense. On the plus side, Heavy Rain has a completely fluid, reactionary plot. I was playing a scene where I unintentionally let a side character die, so I re-loaded my save file. I tried again, succeeded this time, and moved on. It was at this point I realized that the entire plot would have moved along with her being dead. Entire scenes would be different, including some of the endings. I was quite impressed.

In the background is where the game really shines. The setting and tone are amazing. If there’s one thing that director David Cage is good at, it’s atmosphere. The constant rain and film-noir lighting set a morose tone that perfectly reflects the characters’ mental states. It’s moody and bleak, with excellent art design and incredible execution. This game is absolutely gorgeous. Every building, every street, every person looks exactly as worn as you’d expect them to be in real life. The character models are impeccably detailed. The textures used, which are showcased well in loading screens, are incredible. The detail is just… insane. Quantic Dream is known for their motion capture techniques, which are put to good use here. The movement is about as good as games are doing to get without going into uncanny valley territory. At rare moments there’s a weird mouth movement here or there, but it’s much better than a lot of other stuff you’ll see. All the models are compiled from the actor’s faces, and all the scenes were acted out in real life with motion-capture suits. One of the special features said there were thousands of different variations of different scenes shot. That is dedication.

There is… aggravatingly enough for me, one huge problem. The voice acting. Dear GOD, Ethan’s voice! The guy playing him, Pascal Langdale, was doing his best, but he was hired for his appearance. Separate and/or localized voice actors would’ve been a huge improvement. It felt to me, at certain points, like it was written BY a serial killer, and this is how he thinks people talk. That really awkward, way too normal conversation that no one really talks like, you know? Ethan’s dialog is so wooden in the beginning, he almost seems like he’s not in the same scene. He thankfully gets much better about halfway through. The children are, much to the dismay of my poor ears, unintelligible for the whole performance. Jayden’s voice is at least emotional, if a little bit annoying. He kinda sounds like Dante from Clerks, strangely enough. Shelby’s voice sounds WAY too upbeat, all the time, in the weirdest situations. Madison is definitely the best. She sounds tired and stressed out, she reacts to the environment around her, and she always seems, for lack of a better word… human. Being that I’m a big voice-work nut, I imagine this is something only weirdos like me would notice. It’s not enough to ruin the game; the speech just seems terribly awkward, like it’s been translated too many times. That might actually be the case here, though, so you can’t be too hard on it.

An extremely intense and stylish game, Heavy Rain is definitely a title to check out. It’s perfect for fans of suspense and murder mysteries, adventure gamers, and lovers of film-noir. It’s grimy in all the right places, and the classiest kind of dark. It eschews that overused, typical “grittiness”, for a kind of solemn grief and tension that attaches you to the world and the people inside it. Not once did I stop caring for the outcome of the people I was playing, their lives inextricably tied to my choices. I wanted to finish Shelby’s segment, JUST so I could find out what happened to Ethan. I needed to help these people navigate their way through a situation none of them chose, but were nonetheless stuck with. Some people may criticize Heavy Rain for trying to be too many things. Some say it’s not enough of anything, that it’s just a really long movie. They’re probably right, but… you know what? It’s a good movie, and that’s more than can be said for most media these days.

So anyway, Dante’s Inferno was released this month, published by EA (of course) and developed by Visceral Games. My research team informs me that Visceral is responsible for the fairly well known Dead Space, but also the lesser known The Simpsons Game, and The Godfather II, which gives them kind of a weird résumé really. Inferno falls somewhere in the middle. It’s put together extremely well, but lacks its own soul, and the experience suffers for it. Not to say this game is bad, by any means. I really enjoyed playing it. It’s just not very original, on a few levels. It also contains FAR more naked breasts than the poem. More on that later.

    The game starts with the titular Dante, camped in a forest, just casually sewing a cross to his chest. There is absolutely no explanation for this, aside from I guess making him “extremely badass” and at the same time “somewhat retarded”. I imagine it’s some sort of penance thing, but probably more to serve the aforementioned badassery. The cross also conveniently has the plot and back story drawn on it, as well as naked ladies. Before we can ask what the hell, the images start animating and segue to the next scene. We cut to the city of Acre, where Dante is a soldier in the crusades. You proceed to murder infidels, presumably for god, I imagine. Who cares? Who are YOU to question the lord’s plan, you heretic? After some boobs and a brief intro/training fight our hero is confronted by Death. This is, of course, unacceptable, and he decides that kicking Death’s ass is both the appropriate response, and a wise decision. Fortunately, this is a video game, and this plan proves to be extremely effective. Our protagonist returns home hoping to see his girlfriend Beatrice’s knockers, and things get a tad metaphysical from here on. Without spoiling the plot, Busty LaRoo is taken to hell, and Dante vows to travel there and back to save her. The game follows you through the layers of hell, each thematically appropriate for the sin punished there. Sadly, the story mostly falls flat, weighed down by the annoying trend of making everything ultra badass and naked. It kills what could have been a stylish and poetic adaptation, instead relying on familiarity and poorly executed Rule of Cool. The game’s strength lies not in style or plot, but in gameplay and design.

    The combat in Dante’s Inferno is as per usual. Weak attacks, strong attacks, throws, obligate quick-time event finishes, etc. As much as I’d like to bash these conventions, they DO work well, and fighting is fun and challenging. The obvious “It’s God of War” parallels are there of course, and really don’t need to be mentioned. Except right here, I guess. Shut up. The menus are fine, if a bit plentiful, but menus are usually never an issue, unless they’re incredibly obtrusive. The game has RPG style leveling, and morality system, squished together fairly effectively. The morality system makes sense in context, I suppose, since we are descending into Hell. There’s just no real explanation for it. You have the power to judge souls. Enjoy. The overall problem of unoriginality is stemmed by the fact that these features are unoriginal because they work. It really depends on your taste and play style, in the end. There’s really not much to criticize on in terms of structure, it’s just not really innovative. Did I mention it has boobs?

In the end, despite all the flaws that only a nit-picky gamer would notice, Dante’s Inferno is fun. The story is quite unabashedly not quite the original poem (although the major points seem to be present), the combat is something we’ve seen before, and the design is blatant and cliché. The whole thing seems like it was designed by and for 13 year old boys, but goddamn it, It has violence and boobies, and I’m so going to hell.

OARK VOIO

So I took home Dark Void when I saw the cover and thought “Neat, The Rocketeer. In game form.” Much to my surprise it was, eeeehhhhh… completely and exactly that, right down to the steam punk WW2 setting.  Except Dark Void doesn’t take place in Europe where, y’know… the actual war is happening. And it isn’t so much “steam” punk as it is “ambiguous early 20th century technology” punk. Was The Rocketeer steam punk? I don’t remember. It was some kind of punk, I know that. I just don’t know what kind of punk. Stop saying punk. It seems like they were tryin’ for the steam variety, but I’m pretty sure we had internal combustion in the 30′s. I’d call it Tessla-punk, but that wouldn’t be alternate history. At any rate, the game takes place at the beginning of…. a war …. being kicked off by, uh… The Facists. I’m not kidding. That’s how the protagonists refer to them. Just… The Facists. I suppose being a capcom game it may be reluctant to talk about a former ally which is now the personification of all things nasty and ok to shoot at.

We start off with a flight test in some canyons in 1938, with some guy on the radio explaining how to fly. The whole thing is very nondescript. The training level is interrupted by some UFO/Gyroscopey things, and when you shoot down enough, we fade to black. Some time later, we pull up on an airfield where our protag Nathan Dra- I mean Will, is loading up his plane with his plucky sidekick. Our heroine Ava walks up, and we find that the two have some history. ROMANCE! They proceed to bicker adorably, and then the plot, er…plane… takes off. The crew are flying over the carribbean, for some reason, carrying… something… they never really go into it, and our heroes are flirting precociously. As soon as they move into the bermuda triangle, all the instruments go predictably haywire, and they are attacked by something we never really get a good look at. The plane explodes and crashes, and our adventure begins. The pair wander through the jungle quipping (with a weirdly short radio distance), until they are attacked by I, Robots. Salem, I mean Will…”finds” some incredibly large and anachronistic assault rifles, and proceed to mow down anything that’s blue. Desm-Will and Ava get serperated, of course, and she proceeds to guide you through the jungle to some village, the existance of which you’ll have to take her word for. I wont give away any more of the plot because, well, I wasn’t really paying attention to it.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t even finish this game. The story is derivative, even for me, and the characters are all flat and uninteresting. I just wasn’t compelled to see them through their journey. I had no motive to fight the enemies, after all, we don’t really know WHY they’re enemies. Perhaps they’re mad a large plane crashed into their jungle, and are defending themselves. Of course, they are revealed to be “unexplicably malevolent alien” types, obviously,but we don’t know that when we start shooting. Even the weapons are boring, with big red assault rifles, and plasma guns called “Opressor” and the like. Ok, so… the Tessla dynamite is pretty cool, but it’s not enough to make up for the rest of it.

Dark Void is a third person shooter, in the vein of Uncharted. In the way that it IS Uncharted. Will is basically a clone of Nathan, which I honestly believe wasn’t intentional. It’s just that these sarcastically charming reluctant hero characters are so one dimensional it’s hard to make them unique. On that note, I have a question. Does Nolan North have to be in EVERYTHING? Not that I don’t like the guy’s voice work, but he’s really only being used for that one character. Which gets boring. Not to mention that Nathan Fillion would have suited the leather clad flyboy much better (heh), but he’s kind of a one trick pony as well. Anyway… Moving on.
The game controls fairly well, with standard 3PS controls. But really, bad controls haven’t been a problem in the last five years, especially with shooters. They’ve found a good layout, and they stick to it. The foremost “feature”, namely the flight and 3d movement, works intuitively and didn’t raise any problems. They even have and inverted option for backwards whackjobs like me. The only complaint I’d have, I guess, is that the vertical fight sequences can be a bit disorienting. I think that’s the point though, so it’s not really a problem. The combat is fairly bland. It’s just Uncharted “in space” really. Fire, cover, fire, cover, etc. There’s a weapon upgrade system, and some collectibles to reveal story, and really just a bunch of things we’ve seen before. The whole thing is fairly meh.

It’s not that using tried formulas is bad. It’s just that sometimes, it makes your work tired and uncompelling. It’s impossible to make a completely original idea, sure, but the trick is dressing up the idea you’re using in a way that makes it fresh and alluring. Something that makes us forget that we’ve seen it all before. Dark Void sadly, comes up short here. It had potential, but there just wasn’t enough spark to make it shine, even with Tessla. It’s the fluorescant lightbulb to his magnificent coil. I imagine the publishers were opting for the safe, sellable route, but unfortunately it hurt the product in the end. Give the game a rent if you want to try it, it’s not completely terrible. Just don’t expect anything shocking. Ok, no more electricity jokes.